Excel is an application that allows you to create and manipulate spreadsheets electronically. Spreadsheet software is used to store data in columns and rows that can then be organized and/or processed. Spreadsheets are designed to work well with numbers but often include text. Text in a spreadsheet is called a label, because it labels columns and rows of numbers. Numbers are called values and are used for counts or measurements, dates, times, and calculations from numbers. Spreadsheets can help organize data, like alphabetizing a list of names or other text or reordering records according to a numeric field. However, spreadsheets are more often used for calculating, such as totaling a column of numbers or generating a more sophisticated formula to calculate some statistical measure on a list of numbers.
If you are an experienced Excel user, you will see an exciting new interface in Excel 2007. A detailed overview comparing Excel 2007 to earlier versions is available in a later section. If you wish to go to that section now click here (link to New Features). An Excel 2007 workbook is comprised of multiple worksheets and may include the following:
- up to 1,600 columns of data.
- up to 1,000,000 rows of data.

